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The livestream started like thousands of others that day. A grainy webcam. A young face barely visible in dim lighting. A voice pitching a token with a cartoon logo and a name that would be forgotten by morning.
But this pitch was different.
The creator wasn’t promising revolutionary technology or explaining tokenomics. Instead, he was holding something to his head—something that glinted in the low light. The chat erupted: heart emojis, rocket ships, frantic messages begging him to stop. Others egged him on: “Do it.” “Send it.” “This will pump so hard.”
Russian roulette for market cap. A loaded chamber for liquidity. Your dignity or your bag—choose one.
Welcome to Pump.fun, where the only thing more worthless than the tokens is the price of human attention.
There’s a dark irony bleeding through the heart of crypto’s 2024 bull run. While Bitcoin soars past $90,000 and institutions in tailored suits queue up to buy ETFs—while CNBC talks about “digital gold” and pension funds allocate billions—one of the year’s most profitable platforms has become a case study in everything wrong with this industry.
Meet Pump.fun: a Solana-based memecoin factory that made $60 million in transaction fees in just six months, launched over a million tokens, and became so spectacularly toxic it had to kill its own livestreaming feature after users threatened suicide, performed sex acts, and gambled with their lives on camera—all to pump their worthless tokens.
In November, a 13-year-old boy used this platform to scam traders out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He walked away with $50,000. The platform took its cut. Everyone moved on to the next launch.
This isn’t a cautionary tale from crypto’s past—some ICO-boom horror story we can safely archive as “lessons learned.” This is happening right now, today, as you read this.
The platform is still running. New tokens still launch every few minutes. And someone, somewhere, is getting very, very rich from it. The question isn’t whether this is sustainable. It’s whether anyone actually cares that it’s not.
Pump.fun’s pitch is deceptively simple: anyone can create a token in seconds with no coding knowledge required. Pay a small fee, upload an image, write a description, and boom—you’re a crypto founder. The platform handles the liquidity pool, the bonding curve, and the technical apparatus that used to require developers.
In the first half of 2024 alone, the platform processed over a million token launches. That’s roughly 5,500 new cryptocurrencies created every single day. For perspective, there are only about 10,000 publicly traded stocks in the entire United States.
The business model is genius in its simplicity: Pump.fun takes a cut of every transaction. It doesn’t matter if a token succeeds or fails. It doesn’t matter if it’s legitimate or a scam. Every trade generates fees. The house always wins.
And business was booming. Daily revenue hit a staggering $14.3 million on a Saturday in November, nearly tripling the platform’s previous high—until the livestreams started.
Pump.fun added a livestreaming feature to help token creators market their coins. The idea seemed innocent enough: let creators pitch their projects directly to potential buyers, build community, and explain their vision.
What actually happened was a race to the bottom that would make even the most jaded crypto observer uncomfortable.
Creators quickly realized that in a marketplace flooded with thousands of daily token launches, only the most outrageous stunts got attention. And attention meant buyers. And buyers meant profits.
So they escalated. They competed. They pushed boundaries most platforms would never allow.
Users threatened to waterboard themselves if their token didn’t hit certain price targets. Others played Russian roulette. Some performed live sex acts. One user fired a gun out of a window to “celebrate” a price increase. Another threatened to shoot their dog unless the token reached an $11 million market cap. Children threatened family members over token performance.
The platform became a grotesque fusion of financial speculation and reality TV shock value, where human dignity was traded for market cap.
In November 2024, Pump.fun finally disabled the livestreaming feature. Not because of any moral awakening, but because the situation had become indefensible. The damage, however, was already done.
Perhaps nothing encapsulates Pump.fun’s toxicity better than the story of “Gen Z Quant.”
In November 2024, a 13-year-old child created a memecoin, promoted it through Pump.fun’s livestream, and watched as hype-driven traders pumped it to a $1 million market cap. Then he did what any rational actor in an unregulated casino would do: he dumped his entire holdings, walking away with around $30,000 to $50,000 (reports vary).
The token crashed. His buyers lost everything. And the platform that enabled it kept its transaction fees.
Let that sink in: a middle schooler successfully executed a pump-and-dump scheme using infrastructure designed to make such scams effortless. He didn’t hack anything. He didn’t break into the system. He simply used it exactly as intended.
This wasn’t an edge case. This was the system working as designed.
By January 2025, the lawsuits arrived. Pump.fun was sued for allegedly operating as an unregistered securities exchange and promoting pump-and-dump schemes. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority banned the platform entirely in December 2024 for operating without proper authorization.
The lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York accuses Baton Corporation Limited—the entity behind Pump.fun—and its three co-founders (Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale) of raking in nearly $500 million in fees while facilitating unregistered securities sales.
The defense? Pump.fun is “just infrastructure.” They’re not responsible for how users choose to use their platform. They’re neutral technology providers.
It’s the same argument we’ve heard from every controversial platform in the tech era: Facebook and election interference. YouTube and radicalization. Twitter and harassment. We’re just the pipes, they say. We’re not responsible for what flows through them.
But there’s a crucial difference here. Traditional social media platforms at least pretend to moderate content. They have terms of service. They ban egregious behavior, even if inconsistently. They invest billions in content moderation teams.
Pump.fun’s entire business model depends on not caring. The worse the behavior, the more attention it generates. The more attention, the more trades. The more trades, the more fees.
They’re not neutral infrastructure. They’re a profit machine optimized for exploitation.
Here’s what makes the Pump.fun story so troubling for crypto advocates: the platform represents everything the industry claims to stand against while embodying everything it actually incentivizes.
Crypto promises financial democratization and freedom from institutional gatekeepers. Pump.fun delivered exactly that—and it was a disaster.
Crypto celebrates permissionless innovation and censorship resistance. Pump.fun is the logical endpoint of those values taken to the extreme.
Crypto champions “code is law” and automated, trustless systems. Pump.fun built exactly that kind of system. The code worked perfectly. The law was ruthlessly efficient. And it created a predatory casino where children could scam adults, where desperate people could be exploited for entertainment, and where the only rule was “number go up.”
The platform generated nearly $60 million in fees in six months. Someone made an enormous amount of money facilitating this. And they did so using the exact principles crypto thought leaders have been championing for years.
As of now, Pump.fun continues to operate despite UK bans and US lawsuits. The livestreaming feature is gone (though it was quietly reintroduced in April 2025 to 5% of users with stricter moderation), but the token factory remains. Thousands of new coins still launch daily. Most die within hours. Some pump briefly before their creators cash out. The cycle continues.
The platform’s defenders argue that this is simply free-market capitalism at work: consenting adults choosing to speculate. Caveat emptor. Don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.
But when 13-year-olds are running pump-and-dumps, when people are threatening self-harm for token pumps, when livestreamed exploitation becomes a marketing strategy—at what point does “free market” become “lawless hellscape”?
Bitcoin may be winning institutional acceptance. ETFs may be bringing Wall Street money into crypto. But platforms like Pump.fun reveal what happens when you strip away all guardrails and call it freedom.
The bull market is here. The institutions are buying. The price is up.
And somewhere on Solana, someone just launched their ten-thousandth memecoin of the day.
The house is still winning.
Pump.fun isn’t an aberration. It’s not a bug in the crypto system. It’s a feature. It’s what happens when you build financial infrastructure with no consideration for human consequences and then call it disruption.
The platform’s success—both in revenue and user adoption—proves that when given the tools for completely permissionless financial speculation, humans will use them in the most exploitative ways imaginable.
And someone will get rich facilitating it.
That’s the real story of Pump.fun. Not the livestreams. Not the lawsuits. Not even the 13-year-old scammer.
It’s that the system worked exactly as designed.
And that should terrify us.
